Exercise 1 of Course "Human-Computer Interaction" (March 1999)

Reserve a trip from June 22 to July 2 from Geneva to New York (JFK) with two airline company's on-line reservation systems. Give back your exercises with the following responses:

1) Write a paragraph of 5 lines to describe each of the on-line systems

Swissair (http://www.swissair.ch) has a nice site design, and was relatively easy to use. Price was $765.40 and no cheaper fares were suggested. The special Youth offer is interesting, but proved useless due to a Web problem (see below) and it's incapability to display which day around June 22 had free seats.

SSR Reisen (http://www.ssr.ch) is the Swiss Student Travel Agency. It looked like an "on-line reservation system" and I found a very cheap flight for SFR 580.- with British Airways. Only at the very end of the process one gets notified that now actually an SSR employee will call you back ASAP to confirm the booking...

2) How long does it take you to reserve your trip for each of the on-line systems?

	Swissair: ca. 10-15'
	SSR: ca. 5-10'

3) What is action depth for each system?

	Swissair general using Guest membership: 3 clicks, page sequence: homepage-booking-membership-book a flight (on travelocity.com)
	Swissair Youth: ca. 9 clicks, but stopped after no seats where free on or around June 22. Page sequence: homepage-booking-Jugendangebote-First time user-Thank you-Welcome to Youth Fares-More-New York-Next Month-June 22 (all on swissair.com)
	SSR: 3 clicks, page sequence: Deutsch-Flug Angebote-Nord Amerika-USA

4) What is the allocation of screen space for display area, menu/button and white space?

Swissair's site is ideal, clearly designed by professional Web designers. SSR's site like more semi-professional, which might even be all right considered it's a student agency, or at least it's roots were there.

5) Which system is better and why?

Swissair

Liked the special Youth offer: "Click here for Youth offers out of Switzerland" but as it did technically not work reliable and/or I could not find a free day, it proved unfortunately useless. The price would have been.

SSR

Less nice site design, found a much better price though. That's what's more important to most customers. Not being an actual on-line reservation but having someone call you back does not seem to be a major drawback in my opinion; what you want is a flight, and you want it cheap. If they want to call you, why shouldn't they? (As long as the user does not need to call them.)

Conclusion: I liked SSR better, because for about half the price most users will be ready to accept a not 100% state-of-the-art design and the additional phone call.

6) Give 3 most important changes you can make to each of the system

Swissair

Booking page: It is not immediately clear one has to click on that "Book a Flight" image (dark-blue font, yellow underline) - there should be a blue textual link right at the beginning of the page, allowing to skip the blabla.

Book a flight page: What's the difference between "economy class with" respectivily. "without restrictions" ?

Youth Booking problem: The message "Sorry, no seats available for this fare. Please try another date." appearing on the second (June) Calendar page was immediately replaced by the initial () calendar page - only Back (browser button) made it clear.

Homepage: Don't put the image of a pretty women's face on the homepage, particularly one saying "Click here.." It will make many (men) click on it and distract from the purpose one came to that site, that of booking a flight. ;-)

Membership: Forcing somebody to become a "member" choosing some ID & password and announcing his e-mail can be acceptable on a free software download site, but not on a corporate site where the user pays $750 (Swissair seems to allow up to two guest bookings, but one has to become "Skysurfer member" anyway when actually booking.) The Skysurfer member form (on travelcity.com) is a bit complicated as it complains too much about format; eg. if '+' and '()' are not allowed in the phone number, then just strip it automatically and don't bother the user three times.

When and how is the user going to get billed??? No credit card information asked! I almost booked a flight if I had not Cancelled in the last moment. This should be much clearer; eg. a red message on the last screen saying: "If you click OK now you will actually book a round-trip flight leaving Geneva on June 22 to New York JFK and returning on July 2 for $765.40. You will receive a bill with the ticket by postal mail. Please confirm this action now: [OK] [Cancel]"

SSR

	Stupid blinking "SSR Quiz" in left toolbar, was distracting.
	It was not 100% clear whether there actually was a seat free for the "booked" flight.

Apart from these things, one could imagine for both systems to provide enhanced content; eg. providing interesting Web links to the destination: New York information, going out, current weather etc.


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